EQ+3.+Hall+portfolio


 * Meditation 3:**

The relationships between social identity, power and academic literacy have been in the foreground of my attention since I decided to begin teaching within the New York City public school system. One of the main motivators for my choice of TFA as a conduit to this position was the fact that it gave me the opportunity to work specifically with those students who are systematically disempowered within the educational system. The statistics are there, students of color graduate at disproportionately low rates, and the majority of them live in poverty, are less likely to go to college than their white peers, and more likely to go to jail. After 13 years of education, many students have not achieved the academic literacy which the school system owes them, and without which they are barred from many opportunities – disempowered.

Although already included in another section of this portfolio, the narrative of my point of tension really speaks to the way that one can be privileged / disadvantaged by their social identity. I was met by so few obstacles as I sailed through high school, attended Columbia and became a corps member that even the prejudices related to being a female, which I sometimes faced from peers and superiors in an academic context, pale in comparison to the prejudices that my students face. When I speak with someone, they will, much to my advantage, make the assumption that I’m educated. My students’ language would in many contexts produce the opposite assumption, creating invisible barriers between them and power.

Student’s who experience such disadvantages, both within the school system and without, can respond in many different ways. I believe that many of my students’ resilience toward academic work and lack of interest in acquiring a deeper academic literacy is a response to the disempowerment that they have thus far encountered. If you are a student and the message is that you will not succeed, that academic literacy is “white,” and that this is fundamentally not for you, it makes perfect sense that what you feel excluded from would become undesirable, if not despicable to you. On the other hand, some students may aptly recognize academic literacy as a conduit to opportunity, and be motivated to empower themselves by this means. The danger is that students will still feel there to be some kind of contradiction between their identity and this power, and as such may begin to feel repulsed by certain parts of their identity, see them as bad, or as something that they need to get rid of or improve.

For this reason, it is absolutely essential that students who are not members of the dominant culture receive their education in a way that actively avoids making negative assumption about their ability, and in a way that does not uncritically accept dominant culture as the de facto norm. Critical thinking about context and these various forces at play (their identities, academic literacy and power) must be a part of these students’ education if they are to be empowered by it. Where there are so many factors working to disadvantage these students, their acquisition of academic literacy and a sense of respect and relevance surrounding their primary discourses are some of the most important things that we as their educators can facilitate in order to enable them as self-determining subjects.

Artifacts:

(First portion contains a lesson to get students actively thinking about academic literacy and power)

[|If Black English isn't a language, then tell me what is] (See annotations in Structured choice Part One)